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Early Access 'Waves' - Updating Here


ScramblesTD

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Not everyone is sitting at home staring at the launcher or staring at their email. Many people who are waiting for early access are at work and unable to log in at this time.

 

If they are checking for server stability, they have to realize that if they send out, say 250,000 invites today. Maybe half (and I'm being generous) are logging in immediately. They have to give time for the other half to log in later.

 

QFT - I've noticed that the community tends to skew a bit older than other game sites, so I fully expect that there are many more "older people with responsibilities" in the early-order crowd.

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No they aren't. There's people that pre-ordered significantly later that are already given access. I don't care when I get in, but I do feel cheated when they promise that they will use one methodology for determining access and then apparently use something utterly different. If they said from the start that it would be random then I wouldn't care, but promising people to do them "in order" and then giving access to someone who ordered in December over someone who ordered in July is abhorrent.

 

You realize those people who claim to have pre-ordered in December and are already in are trolls, right? Just because you're not used to trolls, doesn't mean anything is wrong on Bioware's end.

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No problem with the waves but its about time an MMO company realises the most important issue on launching an MMO is communication with its player base. A representative of BW shouls be scanning these forums and asking questions back at base. Then a post that players can read but not post in set up relaying information back. For example clearly many people are questioning the 4 wave comment, how hard would it to be to ask a techie at BW if anymore are planned and then relate the information.

 

We may not be able to speed up our invitation but if BW could let us know they are listening to us it will please a lot of people.

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This is a spectacular failure from Bioware here.

 

Their failure is not in how they have approached the Early Access, which seems reasonable, but in their total lack of communication about anything. They have essentially buried their heads in the sand for the "oncoming storm" of angry customers, merged everything into one long thread so that they automatically have the excuse that they "didn't see it", and absolutely refuse to discuss any timings.

 

I would understand if we preordered in middle of August or something, but there are those of us who are right on the borderline for late July preorders that are basically **** out of luck. We don't want to miss our time and Bioware (and their representatives on Twitter) are point blank refusing to discuss it.

 

They have said that the "plan" was always for four waves of invites per day. Why exactly did they not tell us this? Why did they not tell us the distribution of preorders before today?

 

There are no excuses for this outside of "we're worried that we will **** it up and don't want to look like idiots".

 

I cannot believe the level of service that Bioware is providing on a day as important to them as today. They are EA bad in how they have done this.

 

"Right well, you customers will get Early Game Access, but we don't know when and we can't tell you if it will be today or in seven days, nor can we tell you the times when we are sending out the invites, nor cane we tell you when we know this or on what factors it is based. Please sit there refreshing your email inbox until you get in"

 

When you have other companies that go out if their way to help you, this is just unacceptable from a customer service perspective. If I provided this as an answer to a customer (and I'm in the software business), I'd be sacked immediately and with good reason.

 

Yeah, couldn't agree more. When will companies understand that their paying customers can take quite a bit, as long as you provide them (us) with information! If BW told me that I would be able to log on somewhere between noon and 18 on thursday, that wouldn't really upset me. But asking me to check my email every minute for 7 days? Are you (BW) intentionally trying to tick people off? Because obviously, you're doing just that...and that's probably not the best strategy possible.

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1) All the people foaming because they don't get to start today, rofl. Instead of asking, "Why didn't everyone get access to the game before it's official release date?" maybe you should be asking, "Why would Bioware given anyone early access?" Answer to the latter: because they're nice. I can't believe people are complaining that anyone is getting early access.

 

2) To the people that are upset because everyone who preordered should get the same treatment... um, how about no? There's something in the real world called lines. You may want to learn how the work (i.e. first in, first out policy).

 

3) To all the people who are complaining that servers are dead right now even with 3 waves so far... you do realize that there is probably a good portion of those early-wave people who are working, asleep, or just not able to log in right now. Sorry, not everyone can be starting at a gray "Login" button and their launcher and hitting refresh on their email every 3 seconds like some of you...

 

4) I didn't redeem until 11/22 so I won't be seeing EA for a while. I'm hoping by this weekend, but if not, it's really no big deal. In the end, it doesn't even matter. By the 20th, I will be playing this game. Whether it's as a lvl 1 toon or a lvl 30 toon, it's all good. And in 3 months (assuming I'm still playing), I'll be a lvl 50 toon pvp'ing and doing flashpoints and operations... with or without the early start.

 

So, seriously, to the foamers and ragers... please calm down. Your sense on entitlement that you are owed Early Access to the game "right now" is annoying. You are the customer base that no one likes to deal with... ever.

 

well said

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I pre-ordered on July 26th also and still no e-mail.

 

who knows.

 

for some reason I also have a thing saying 11-02 (early access).

 

not sure what that is from but I definitely pre-ordered in July and entered my code that day.

 

hope the 11-02 thing isn't screwing my chances of getting in earlier!!!

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I think they have failed the gaming community and the damage is done. It will take a miracle for them to make this fiasco right. The reality they planned early access ALL WRONG...

 

 

That are Treating EGA as a stress Beta and that is a terrible LIE to paying customers....so they are admitting their servers MAY not be able to handle all the people that have already paid for the game?

 

How else is it to be interpreted other than the servers can not handle the launch ??????

 

I am worried I paid 90 bucks for a game with terrible servers and service...

 

and no one talks about the Grace Period at all I guess it is a dead issue now?

 

My Pre-order said nothing about "waves" and staggered invites this is BULL CRAP! PERIOD!:mad:

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Okay, so I've admittedly become a little incensed and as a result inflammatory in some of my attempts to try and shed a little light on this situation. Do I work for Bioware? No, and as such you shouldn't take any of this as gospel. But I am a relatively intelligent human being who does work in the IT industry and has for many years, and as such am capable of some informed conjecture that many of you might find illuminating.

 

I fully expect a large portion of the current complainers to dismiss this out of hand, but that's okay. Somebody will read this and go "Oh, that makes sense". That person will make this post a success.

 

The first point, and to me the most obvious, is that nobody should feel entitled to get into early access today. Why? Because it wasn't promised to you.

 

The marketing for Early Access clearly stated that you would be guaranteed "Up to five days" of early access. That's not "guaranteed five days earlier than everyone else", it's "guaranteed a chance to play early, possibly as early as five days before launch". It's much akin to when you hear an advertisement on television or the radio for a sale, and they say "up to 15% off selected items". You don't then walk into the store, pick out something marked down by 5% and then complain that they advertised falsely, do you? Of course not. Everybody understands the concept of "up to".

 

Please note that the advertising was always worded this way, it hasn't changed, and anybody who tells you different is trying to justify their anger and/or trolling you.

 

Furthermore...we're seven days away from launch, not five days. Things went so well during the beta weekends that Bioware felt it was safe to move up the Early Access start date by two days. That's an extra possible two days of early play...this is a Very Good Deal and you're punishing Bioware by raising such a fuss about it.

 

Moving on.

 

Many people are incensed that Bioware is trickling people onto the servers, as opposed to just throwing the doors open and allowing everyone who pre-ordered to simply jump online. Many of you are stating that Biowares infrastructure should already be in place and tested, that if they're afraid of letting everyone on at the same time for Early Access, then its a dire portent of things to come on launch day.

 

There's a few things you need to understand about this. Firstly, it is highly unlikely that Bioware will see more new purchases on launch day than pre-orders. Remember, most of those who have been chomping at the bit for this game pre-ordered, either for Early Access or simply to make sure to secure their copies in case their local retailer becomes sold out. There are six months worth of pre-order customers that they need to allow into Early Access. Thats a lot of people. I don't remember the actual number but it's huge, well beyond what they will see on their very first day of regular box sale. The majority of the launch frenzy will be spread out over the coming weeks, especially with Christmas looming so near.

 

Try and understand, that even with all of the stress-testing that Bioware did during the beta, they really have no way of knowing how well their live-production servers are going to handle all of these users. Or the new client; remember, this is a new client that was just made available for pre-download a week ago. And it's really not even the servers, more so their own network infrastructure, that they are likely worried about. Trickling 600,000 people onto a network is a big deal. Routers and switches burn out, individual drives in storage clusters randomly freeze up and need replacing. A million and one things can go wrong, and it would be highly irresponsible of Bioware to simply throw the doors open and hope they can handle whatever explosion of suck it causes.

 

Stephen Reid has pointed out that they have no proper way of knowing how often waves of users will be allowed onto the servers. This is absolutely understandable; they're monitoring things very closely to see how well they perform, and gaining useful metrics about individual servers as the day progresses. You must understand that the word "server" is ubiquitous. "Anchorhead" is one game server...but it is made up of several if not many physical servers in a distributed cluster. They need to know the expected capacities for their PvE and PvP servers, see how fast they're filling up, see how well they perform, and add/remove physical servers to the distributed system as necessary. Again, it would be very irresponsible of them not to do this.

 

Its kind of like when you stand in line at the grocery store. They have one checkout open -- and as they observe their shoppers, their patterns and turnover, they close and open additional checkout lanes as necessary. The other option is to risk either having everyone waiting forever in one line, or have everything wide open and end up with baggers and checkers standing around doing nothing...or to translate the analogy, wasting resources that they need to keep tight control of in order to provide continued stability in their infrastructure leading in to the future.

 

Please, try and be understanding and patient. The amount of organization and manpower that goes in to something like this is enormous. They're doing a very good job of not making the same mistakes most MMO's make at launch, and they're going to be able to provide us with a much more stable gaming experience early on because of it.

 

 

/wall-o-text

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